Marvin E. Hobson Dr. Williamson ENGL 864 June 30, 2014 Re-Christianization and Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Salt, Bitter, and Good Poetry
In this paper, I suggest that Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s profound, explicit, and bold expressions of faith are all representations and demonstrations of a level of spiritualism that women were not free to express before this period within the British Empire or the Romantic Period. Prior to this era women’s writing was masked in a limited and oppressed façade, which disallowed the amalgamation and true rendering of women’s thoughts, struggles, and abilities. As the pendulum swung from one end to the other during the middle of the nineteenth century, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s placement in history and geographical connections all help to catapult her into the presence of what some might call an authenticated example of spiritual realism, critical protest poetry, and quality writing. [definitions between spiritual realism/realism, etc….]The combination of these three elements represent what I am calling a Re-Christianization. In other words, Barrett Browning utilizes the her oppressors tools to recreate and fully adopt a new and innovative protest poetry that helps to do exactly what poetry was created to do – intellectually liberate those who ingest its principals and ideologies. In the article, “EBB; The Unknown Exegete” the author takes a critical look at EBB’s bibles and the scriptures that she annotated. This article is a wonderful document that reveals to the world EBB’s individualistic understanding of the Bible. [quote] This is a very crucial document, not only because it reveals something unique about EBB, but it allows any reader of her poetry coupled with Biblical influence to understand the separation that she makes from Christians who lived during her time, or more importantly, the Christian who undoubtedly influenced her the most, her father. Her father’s example of Christianity was riddled with hypocrisy, not yet revealed or apparent within the society, which makes EBB’s father a direct mirror or reflection of the Christian community on the verge of Enlightenment, oppressing women and Africans all over the world and even within the walls of the Mother country, Great Britain. EBB, forced to live as an invalid for the first forty years of her life, saw this hypocritical example from her father who did not allow her to leave the house and subjected her to the confines of her room, with her books, her pen, and her imagination as her only outlets of expression. Cearly, this experience serves as a double-edged sword because it is the very oppression that she endures, which allows her to produce protest poetry that speaks to the oppression of women, children, and slaves, of all heritages. Cora Kaplan does an amazing job combining some of EBB’s most potent protest poetry in one place in the anthology of Women’s protest poetry from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, entitled Salt, and Bitter and Good. At the center of this text is the poem by EBB, named, “The Curse of a Nation.”
I've pasted a copy below, but the "Call for Papers" is listed within the word document.
Abstract: Corinne, Fanny & Mary: Objects of Pity Or…? Madame de Stael established herself as a major writer in the 19th century after the publication of Corinne, or Italy (1807), her most critically-acclaimed novel. For literary figures like Emily Dickinson, George Eliot and Jane Austen, de Stael was an influential female powerhouse; for others, like Mary Wollstonecraft, although equally influenced, raucously disagreed with the opinion of Corinne as an “inspirational” figure. Many critics focus on Wollstonecraft’s 1792 novel, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in discussion of de Stael and her Corinne as “objects of pity.” I would like to expand off of this comparison, not as binary, but as justification for de Stael’s conceptualization of Corinne, and Jane Austen’s creation of Fanny Price and Mary Crawford in Mansfield Park (1814). I will primarily use Corinne, or Italy and Mansfield Park, as well as “Chapter V: Animadversions on Some of the Writers Who Have Rendered Women Objects of Pity, Bordering on Contempt” of Wollstonecraft’s to argue that de Stael and Austen used the “object” in both a figurative and literal sense to suggest their own definition of their primary “subject,” the literary female. While the two authors have never been seen as compatriots, I believe their novels work in tandem to mutually counter and represent Wollstonecraft’s feministic viewpoints, and the way the female thrives in a domesticated, patriarchal society.
In the discovery of the subject and object relationship, the literal objects Corinne and Fanny are attached to (art, books, letters, jewelry) as well as the objects they are seen to represent (Corinne and the mechanical doll, Fanny as an object to be acquired) are deliberately placed to answer Wollstonecraft’s question of the “passive indolent wom[a]n” and how they “perform their part” (34).
Dr. Williamson
ENGL 864
June 30, 2014
Re-Christianization and Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Salt, Bitter, and Good Poetry
In this paper, I suggest that Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s profound, explicit, and bold expressions of faith are all representations and demonstrations of a level of spiritualism that women were not free to express before this period within the British Empire or the Romantic Period. Prior to this era women’s writing was masked in a limited and oppressed façade, which disallowed the amalgamation and true rendering of women’s thoughts, struggles, and abilities. As the pendulum swung from one end to the other during the middle of the nineteenth century, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s placement in history and geographical connections all help to catapult her into the presence of what some might call an authenticated example of spiritual realism, critical protest poetry, and quality writing. [definitions between spiritual realism/realism, etc….]The combination of these three elements represent what I am calling a Re-Christianization. In other words, Barrett Browning utilizes the her oppressors tools to recreate and fully adopt a new and innovative protest poetry that helps to do exactly what poetry was created to do – intellectually liberate those who ingest its principals and ideologies.
In the article, “EBB; The Unknown Exegete” the author takes a critical look at EBB’s bibles and the scriptures that she annotated. This article is a wonderful document that reveals to the world EBB’s individualistic understanding of the Bible. [quote] This is a very crucial document, not only because it reveals something unique about EBB, but it allows any reader of her poetry coupled with Biblical influence to understand the separation that she makes from Christians who lived during her time, or more importantly, the Christian who undoubtedly influenced her the most, her father. Her father’s example of Christianity was riddled with hypocrisy, not yet revealed or apparent within the society, which makes EBB’s father a direct mirror or reflection of the Christian community on the verge of Enlightenment, oppressing women and Africans all over the world and even within the walls of the Mother country, Great Britain. EBB, forced to live as an invalid for the first forty years of her life, saw this hypocritical example from her father who did not allow her to leave the house and subjected her to the confines of her room, with her books, her pen, and her imagination as her only outlets of expression. Cearly, this experience serves as a double-edged sword because it is the very oppression that she endures, which allows her to produce protest poetry that speaks to the oppression of women, children, and slaves, of all heritages.
Cora Kaplan does an amazing job combining some of EBB’s most potent protest poetry in one place in the anthology of Women’s protest poetry from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, entitled Salt, and Bitter and Good. At the center of this text is the poem by EBB, named, “The Curse of a Nation.”
Conference Abstract
I've pasted a copy below, but the "Call for Papers" is listed within the word document.
Abstract: Corinne, Fanny & Mary: Objects of Pity Or…?
Madame de Stael established herself as a major writer in the 19th century after the publication of Corinne, or Italy (1807), her most critically-acclaimed novel. For literary figures like Emily Dickinson, George Eliot and Jane Austen, de Stael was an influential female powerhouse; for others, like Mary Wollstonecraft, although equally influenced, raucously disagreed with the opinion of Corinne as an “inspirational” figure. Many critics focus on Wollstonecraft’s 1792 novel, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in discussion of de Stael and her Corinne as “objects of pity.”
I would like to expand off of this comparison, not as binary, but as justification for de Stael’s conceptualization of Corinne, and Jane Austen’s creation of Fanny Price and Mary Crawford in Mansfield Park (1814). I will primarily use Corinne, or Italy and Mansfield Park, as well as “Chapter V: Animadversions on Some of the Writers Who Have Rendered Women Objects of Pity, Bordering on Contempt” of Wollstonecraft’s to argue that de Stael and Austen used the “object” in both a figurative and literal sense to suggest their own definition of their primary “subject,” the literary female. While the two authors have never been seen as compatriots, I believe their novels work in tandem to mutually counter and represent Wollstonecraft’s feministic viewpoints, and the way the female thrives in a domesticated, patriarchal society.
In the discovery of the subject and object relationship, the literal objects Corinne and Fanny are attached to (art, books, letters, jewelry) as well as the objects they are seen to represent (Corinne and the mechanical doll, Fanny as an object to be acquired) are deliberately placed to answer Wollstonecraft’s question of the “passive indolent wom[a]n” and how they “perform their part” (34).